Introduction of the RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility in the UK and Applications of Muons to Material Sciences

Date:

Mon Jan 23, 2012

Start:

15.00

Location:

FWN-Building 5115.0017

Host:

Thomas T. Palstra

Telephone:

+31 50 363 4419

Abstract

RIKEN is one of Japanese national institutes for natural sciences including accelerator physics. Our laboratory has established the RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in the UK in 1994. The world-strongest intense pulsed muon beam is available at the RIKEN-RAL for material sciences. We have collaborated with more than 60 Japanese and 20 International groups in the past 17 years and we are still looking for more active collaborators in order to achieve good sciences using muons.

In my talk, I would like to introduce our RIKEN-RAL Muion Facility, what is the muon, and how we can apply muons to material sciences, that is, the technique named µSR (muon spin relaxation/rotation/resonance). µSR is a microscopic tool to sense the spin dynamics with the unique characteristic time window which is in between NMR and the neutron scattering (10-6 – 10-11 sec).

This character as an experimental tool could give us complementally and/or uniquely interesting results on the spin dynamics and electronic states. In addition to usual µSR techniques, I would like to introduce some special µSR techniques for material sciences.

In order to introduce how to use µSR, I do not concentrate on one specified experimental result but I would like to talk about some µSR results on superconducting materials, magnetic materials and metal complexes. Recent important and successive applications are for the Fe-based superconducting oxides, a BEDT-TTF quantum spin-liquid system and a low-dimensional metal-complex change magnet. These researches are for the study of the dynamics of small spins and to determine the magnetic phase diagram and the gap state. Although I cannot follow all of µSR topics within the limited time, I will also introduce other important µSR applications and results for your references to think about possible plans to use muons. I strongly hope that some of you researchers will be interested in collaborating with RIKEN.